The follow up to this article makes the case even clearer in an Enterprise Java setting , with Frameworks (Struts-Drools-Hibernate) combined to remove the need for a lot of repetitive 'infastructure' type code.

The intention is to extract the business rules from the java code , in a format that non-java people , such as Business analysts can understand. As such , the choice of formats would be XML , Database or some sort of text file (as used by Jess.

There are tools such as DRL Assistant (http://www.zymose.com/faq.html) that can hide the XML format for these business users.